“Textbooks have really great things, but they’re also very limiting,” said Underwood, who is in her 24th year of teaching at Olympia High. “Our kids are digital kids. They respond very well to this kind of tactile environment, where they can get immediate feedback.”
And this technology system is some proprietary POJ from Albania?
as well as a pilot program at Olympia High where students in an intensive college readiness course known as AVID were issued district-owned iPads to use throughout the year for note-taking, research and organization.
“They put them back where they’re supposed to,” she added. “They never put French books back where they’re supposed to.
We have a French Blog where the students' class projects (videos, comics, writing, etc... all created on the iPads) are posted. This allows for students from different class periods to observe and interact not only with what their other peers are doing but also what the other levels of the language are working on. Another really useful hands-on learing experience.
most educational games deal a lot in the “Who?, What?, When?, and Where?” while the questions I hear from young kids are more of the “How?” and “Why?” variety
The fundamental problem is not that learning isn’t fun, it’s that we’re answering questions that kids aren’t asking (Who?, What?, When?, Where?) instead of giving them tools to experiment, build on, and share their own ideas
We need to stop thinking of educational media as fancy content delivery mechanisms (interactive videos and electronic books) and start building tools that help kids design and develop their own understandings of the world through iterative content creation.
Let’s empower children as designers by making concepts and tools accessible to learners and then, above all, let’s give kids megaphones to share their ideas with friends, family, and peers around the world.